AtmanIsBrahman

I can’t answer from experience as I’m an INTJ, but I can answer based on what I know about INTPs. They have a reputation for being unproductive people living in their mom’s basement if their intelligence isn’t nurtured properly. When they are productive, it revolves around deep intellectual curiosity where Ti hero can apply itself to analytical understanding with the help of Ne parent. An INTP can probably answer better what it looks like for them though.

I don’t think it has to be conformity. Rap is basically a form of music that uses rhythm and cadences over an instrumental. A lot of what rappers say and do is conformity, I agree, but not the genre itself.

Hi Leo, I have a question about #441. You say that the answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is that there is Everything. But then you say it doesn't mean that there is a planet filled with flamingos or something like that out there. Wouldn't it mean exactly that? You also say that Everything exists outside of your field of perception. Doesn't this contradict solipsism? And what is this everything if not every possibility, including a planet full of flamingos?

The mind is not an honest actor Big picture understanding is key What rationalism is and why it fails Reality as absolute infinity

What is the most surprising insight you had? How does your understanding now compare with the masculine/feminine polarity in spirituality?

Being against looksmaxxing

Second this!

I’ve been thinking about making this post for a while. I just want to alert you guys to the fact that looks are important for dating. Pickup is nice and all and does help, but our looks matter more realistically. If a very attractive guy does pickup, he will have WAY better results than an average person, let alone someone below average. Let me clarify that I’m not one of the ideological “blackpilled” looksmaxxing people who have been circulating lately. But I have looked into the looksmaxxing space to extract the juice and leave behind all the resentment, ideology, and noise. Why are looks important? Simply put, we evaluate people’s attractiveness almost instantly, as a biologically ingrained mechanism. We essentially have a perfect looks-rating device that we use unconsciously, though we ironically can’t give accurate ratings (people are rated 7/10 on average, which is stupid). Looks are an indicator of genetic quality and there are good survival reasons for why we value them. Doing the whole Owen Cook pickup thing is ineffective if you look bad. Even granted that it helps you get better with women (and I don’t really care to debate how much it does), it’s silly not to be optimizing the other factor that makes you have success with women— looks. Now I’ll evaluate Leo’s looks profile. This is just an honest assessment and not a personal attack. Leo is 6’2. This is a huge advantage in attractiveness, as height is a big factor in addition to facial harmony. The average male height is 5’9, so Leo towers over the average male by 5 inches. Think about this in a club environment—Leo is able to see above other people and actively heightmogs the vast majority of people. 6’2-6’3 is also often considered the ideal height, as beyond that there are diminishing returns and a degree of “freak effect.” Next, Leo is not attractive but not unattractive either facially. I’d estimate he’s probably slightly above average. But what’s interesting is how he has unknowingly looksmaxxed subtly, which is ironic given the emphasis on pickup. The biggest looksmax by far is having a low body fat percentage, which makes your facial structure more visible. Fat is bad for looks, and the ideal range is considered to be 8-12 percent body fat (depending on your specific genetics). Leo is quite lean, far more so than the average person. Additionally, Leo’s facial hair covers a likely suboptimal lower third (chin and jaw area), which is another effective looksmax. So what if Leo was 5’9, overweight, and had no facial hair? Would the results be the same? My point stands. The practical upshot of this is that improving your looks is helpful and worth doing. There is a lot of research into this subject you can do, and you have a choice how far to go, from softmaxxes (non-invasive things like hairstyle, clothing, skincare) all the way to hardmaxxes (surgeries). Obviously be safe and don’t buy into the incel ideology BS. Objections: Looksmaxxing isn’t spiritual. True, but getting laid isn’t spiritual in general; it is survival. If you’re doing survival, might as well do it effectively Why change your face? That’s so insecure/feminine/low-consciousness. Look, being attached to how your face looks is classic ego. The stigma against rhinoplasties is a part of this. If someone wants to improve their nose based on objective considerations and they are well-informed, surgery is awesome. There’s also a certain beauty to aesthetics for their own sake. By looksmaxxing, you are mainly just doing a survival activity, but since you’re focused on the actual truth of attraction, it is a microdose of spiritual embodiment— as it’s closer to truth than “coping”. Spirituality is just seeing the Truth.

Andrew Tate recently got arrested, but he recorded a podcast soon before. There are some lessons to learn from this podcast. 1) You learn about deception mechanisms 2) You learn how a narcissist/egomaniac makes sense of reality and convinces people 3) Being corrupt boomerangs on you 4) It's honestly very entertaining TLDR of the podcast: Andrew Tate explains the full timeline from his rise to fame to the present. He frames himself as initially gaining a niche following from saying whatever he wants on social media. Then, he gets the idea to start a non-traditional school that teaches people how to make money. He gets subscribers and soon gets an offer for 50 million, which he describes as similar to Hollywood contracts that limit what famous people can say. He declines, ruffling feathers with powerful people, especially the British state. A woman falsely accuses him of human trafficking. Then he gets into more and more legal trouble, which he believes is contrived by the British in collaboration with the corrupt Romanian legal system, to shut him down because he is "capable of starting a revolution." He spends months in prison, developing PTSD and ruining his mental health. Tate tells an elaborate thriller movie-like story involving multiple break-ins to his house, framing himself as some kind of real-life John Wick. My Take Tate conveniently leaves out the fact that he ran a shady webcam business prior to becoming famous. He has admitted to using the loverboy method on video, and his “university” contained instruction on how to use this method. It is less likely that Tate was persecuted as a political enemy than that he got exposed for his scheme due to literally teaching it. Overall, it’s very interesting to see the self deception play out. I don’t doubt that Tate suffered in Romanian prison, but that’s because the corruption he planned to benefit from backfired on him. This podcast is a good lesson in seeing through the tricks of con-men. Tate frames everything as him being wronged and probably even believes it. It also goes to show the intelligence of survival. Tate, sensing that he is cornered like an animal, gets on a podcast and spins a highly believable, intricate narrative about how he’s been set up. An uninformed audience would probably side with him. Survival can be very intelligent. Andrew Tate has a strong intellect — it is obvious from his speech — but wisdom? True intelligence? No.

I did some more research and thought about it more, and I was being too impartial. Tate doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt here. I edited my post a little bit to have a more clearheaded analysis.

I’m asking this because I have sober awakenings about every 3 weeks (give or take)—usually induced by thinking about reality or nothing at all. I’m trying to get a sense of how common this is, and how it relates to others’ experiences.

So a person can develop "intelligence" -- wisdom and knowledge -- but IQ is fixed. Is this an accurate explanation of your position? Do you think that G is the same thing as the raw capacity to understand reality, meaning someone's spiritual abilities are capped by it?

Rule #1: don’t assume people are more conscious than they are

When you come across a video with this title, you expect it to be somewhat profound. Unfortunately, Curt spends the entire video talking about conceptual abstractions attempting to define existence— which of course is impossible. He treats the subject as if it’s some kind of academic debate that we’ll eventually find the answer to, if only we refine our conceptual abstractions well enough. But Existence is first order, so it’s impossible. I recommend watching this video to see how the rationalist mind confuses itself. It’s honestly sad to see that this is the state of philosophy and science in the 21st century. This underscores the need for big picture thinking, openmindedness, nonconformity, etc. — basically what Leo teaches. Otherwise philosophy becomes a joke.

Second this, it would be great to get another deep spirituality video. Don’t get me wrong, the recent videos are great, but the last one that feels like true deep spirituality is “A Poetic Description of God Consciousness” 3 years ago.

Ah yes, so a short, ugly person will have the same results as a good-looking tall person running the same game. I don’t deny that game works, but it’s absurd to say looks “don’t matter that much.” Plus you conveniently ignored my point about social outcomes. This isn’t just about dating.

On that note, here is a tidbit of insight for y’all. Height is very important alongside looks. This is because height gives you presence, assertiveness, dominance, etc. A tall person receives more respect and is considered more attractive. So, heightmaxxing is a valuable asset for men. Specifically, if your barefoot height is below 6’1 or so, you should consider doing some heightfrauding to get closer to the ideal range — which is 6’2-6’3 (taller heights give diminishing returns). The way to do this is by wearing shoes that give a natural height boost, such as boots or certain sneakers. Then you can add on to this by adding height increasing insoles to the shoes for an additional boost. Overall, this will add 1.5-4 inches or even more, depending on how extreme you are willing to go.

I wasn’t going to revive this thread, but I sense a lot of self-deception going on here. Let’s just think about this simply. Attractiveness is an important metric for romantic and social outcomes, right? With some honesty we’ll agree on the former, and the latter has great evidence in the form of the halo effect. So if we care about improving any aspects of our life, looks should be one of them. This is simple logic. You guys don’t realize that your ego is tricking you into thinking the looksmaxxers are the deluded ones, while it’s actually you tricking yourselves!

I guess the difference is understanding the functioning of the mechanics of the dream vs the dream that generates the mechanics. I'm sure Curt and other scientists genuinely care about figuring out the mechanics of the dream. It's kind of like being obsessed with a video game and learning all the strategies, lore, map, exploits, etc. The game is ultimately entertainment, but there isn't anything wrong with it per se. I find it problematic when scientists try to understand the dream that creates the mechanics and have no idea where to start, or insist on their mechanical explanations. It's like there's a different plane of thought they haven't unlocked.

It seems like much of the forum hasn't learned the lesson from Leo's Deconstructing Rationalism series. All I'm doing is applying the lesson. It's completely obvious what Curt and academics are doing wrong in terms of Philosophy once you understand it. The issue isn't even awakening or mystical experience, it's the way of thinking. Our 21st century culture essentially indoctrinates itself into being mentally stunted. Curt's way of thinking makes it impossible for him to understand reality unless he changes.

I was referring to the average person’s heaven with a family reunion and 72 virgins. Maybe this is how people interpret mystical teachings through their ego, or alternatively they could come from people’s partial realizations. I’m trying to figure out which one it is.

Then it wasn't full death. Hence "near" death experience. Do you think the idea of heaven/afterlife comes from people having these partial-death experiences, where the ego is still active to some extent?

I probably read about 50% of the book of not knowing. I read the entirety of this book. It is good, although dry writing like all Ralston books. It takes work to get something out of it. Some of the material you might already know if you’ve read Book of Not Knowing and watched Leo, but it’s important to use direct experience to test comprehension and not whether you’ve seen the concept before.

The latest blog posts have been very insightful. Ontological relativity collapses into oneness, all anchor points must dissolve, you have no substance therefore you are God. Beautiful stuff. It’s also cool to see that I actually understand some of this stuff now, whereas before they were mindfucks that may or may not be true.

I thought of another even more simplified model. It has four categories: 1) How the ego relates to itself 2) How the ego relates to other egos 3) How the ego relates to God/Reality/Truth 4) How the ego becomes God, i.e. relates to God as God These categories put self-help concepts and practices into an even more big-picture overview. For example, Understanding your personality, health, and life purpose fit best into (1), while socialization, looksmaxxing, getting money fit into (2), philosophy and rationality fall into (3) and establish the bridge into the only non-egoic category, (4)— merging with God. Of course all these distinctions are collapsible. They are just meant to give a new way of looking at self-help.